Abstract

   This project was conceived in the fall of 2013 as an attempt to interrogate the relationship between the artist and the communities/cultures they seek to investigate through their work. What kinds of questions emerge when an artist enters a community as an art-maker or with the intention of 'empowering' other artists within that community? Are they telling their own stories or those of their subjects? Should or can the artist become involved in the community/culture of their subjects? Although these questions pertain to contemporary art practice and theory in general, we will primarily address film and video in the interest of narrowing our focus and manageability. The project will approach questions of representation, ethnography, documentary, hybridity, community and culture from a philosophical stance - asking why it is important for the artist to ask these kinds of questions against both an ever-changing contemporary context and a homologizing global world economy.

   The title of this blog should likely be changed to Where I belong insofar as the project is closely related to the questions implicit in my own work as an artist. Having spent time exploring painting, sound, performance art, light installation, etc, my questions/curiosities have recently turned to film and video. I have come to believe that these many interests might be served by the Gesamtkunstwerk that is film/videomaking. It has the potential to involve as many factors as we are capable of being aware of - light, sound, movement, gesture, gaze, perspective, interpellation, voice, color, depth, etc. In this sense, film, video, and the ever-expanding realms of hypermedia are - more than anything else in my opinion - equipped to articulate the complex relations of time and space that characterize postmodern culture. Film and video can demonstrate the unutterable in a way that requires our full presence. Yet it is precisely this potential that requires a greater degree of attention and responsibility. In this way, any interest in social/cultural phenomena and film/video necessitates an interrogation of the questions implicit to documentary and ethnography.  

   With respect to this question of why ethnography? I guess that I have never properly posed the question to myself. I suppose that with all of my other pursuits the impetus began as curiosity - whether those I respected practiced the particular medium or that I thought I simply might enjoy it. Yet the reason why we begin something and the reason we maintain it are quite different from one another. Ethnography is an interesting practice because it is not like a guitar or a paint brush, you cannot simply pick it up and try it out. In this sense one might need both the reason to begin and the reason to maintain before picking up the camera. I am not interested in ethnography as it has been historically practiced, but I am interested in the questions that ethnography (the study of cultural phenomena) has invariably attempted (and failed) to answer. It is the impossibility of representation that draws me in. In this way it is 'experimental' ethnography that interests me - - how to disrupt and reconceive the way social and cultural processes are represented in such a way that we become aware of the fallacy that is supposed documentary truth. How do we remove ourselves from the implied division of the world between those out there (the subjects of ethnography) and those in here (in the theater, audience). Although this these questions seem to be specific to film/video, later I will demonstrate that there is an anthropological quality to contemporary art discourse in general.

   The reason for choosing a blog over the formalisms of analytic paper is that the blog format allows for a greater degree of discursive freedom. Whereas a paper requires a number of different texts to be reduced to a relational thesis, a blog encourages self-dialogue, individualized attention to separate texts and perhaps most importantly, a space that can involve disjunction, internal dissonance, and self-refutation. In this way we must presume that our starting point is not really how we should begin. We are not yet asking the important questions. But it is only through this self dialogue, the active performance and experimentation of ideas in a publicly accessible format, that we allow for the potential of true synthesis.